Source: Radio New Zealand
123RF
Job seekers say not being able to tell if some companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) to screen their cover letters and CVs is dehumanising.
The unemployment rate has slightly eased from a 10-year high according to new data, but jobseekers say the struggle to find work has prompted them to get their CVs professionally written to stand out against AI algorithms.
Experts say while AI can be useful to screen hundreds of applicants, it has also created a gap in transparency between jobseekers and employers.
At the end of last year, *Sam closed her laptop after finishing her last assignment for her Bachelor of Communications. But after graduating from Wellington’s Victoria University, looking for a full-time job could not be harder.
“It’s just been absolutely gut-wrenching at this point; I’ve been looking for a job for well over a year.
“Every week you just get countless emails of just the default: ‘Thanks, but no thanks, we’ve decided to go in a different direction, and you’re one of 150 to 300 applicants average.’”
Sam said the only thing keeping her in Aotearoa was family and elderly grandparents, and she would also face paying interest on her student loan if she left the country.
Throughout the job application process, she said it was often hard to tell if she had been screened by AI.
“I have definitely felt like some of the screening has been done by AI, because if you’re applying for a job on SEEK, it tells you how many other people have applied through SEEK.
“There’s some jobs that I’ve applied for that have had well over 800 applicants – you can’t expect an HR person to go through every single one of those. So, either they’re just picking one of those… they’re just picking a number, picking a random selection and culling from there.”
The uncertainty of whether some companies were using AI for job screening had turned some people to get their CV written professionally.
Sarah Wrightson ran a CV-writing company based in Te Awamutu and said her customer base was up 50 percent on last year.
“CVs are being scanned for the key words, job titles, formatting – and if they don’t match [the job description] closely enough, they get rejected instantly.
“It’s a shame because we ultimately want humans to read them, and good candidates are being knocked out of the chance to get the job because of technical reasons, not capability.”
In the last year, Wrightson had been approached by a wider range of people looking for help.
“A lot of senior experienced professionals, people who have not job-hunted in years, sometimes decades, and they say, ‘I’ve never had to write a CV like this before.’
“People that have been made redundant, so they’re coming in needing their documents fairly quickly and they’re often applying for roles that they haven’t considered before.
“There’s [also] people that are stuck after months of applying, they’ve been sending out applications with no response, getting rejections about feedback and they’re starting to lose confidence.”
Wrightson told Checkpoint that AI had led to disconnection between employers and jobseekers. She said employers were less trusting of cover letters and CVs made with AI, while jobseekers felt they were being unfairly rejected by algorithms.
“Job hunting has become like a skill in itself and a fulltime job, the time that it takes to tailor all your applications properly.
“On the other side, employers are struggling too – they’re getting too many applications, and it can be hard for them to spot the genuine candidates.”
Alistair Knott, an AI professor at Victoria University said AI could be useful for employers in the first stage of job applications. But he said screening by a human could properly determine whether someone was fit for the job.
“A useful thing that companies are doing is leaning towards different forms of assessment. They want to see videos of people talking to see something about them, they want to see things which can’t be scripted by AI.
“So, they don’t want videos of people who may be looking at their phones and reading out a script, they want to hear what is in someone’s head.”
He said AI had created a strange dynamic between employers and job seekers.
“My AI is talking to your AI, I’m the applicant and I’ve produced my application with AI and you’re the employer and you’re screening me with AI. It’s rather easy for the human to fall out of the loop.”
Stats NZ data out on Wednesday showed unemployment dropped slightly to 5.3 percent in the first quarter of this year, from 5.4 percent in the previous quarter. But the number of people between 15 and 24 years who were unemployed, not in education or training, increased to 14.4 percent from 13.3 percent.
In December last year, unemployment was at its highest level since March 2015.
*Sam’s name has been changed to protect her identity.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand